United States Spring Music Festival – Beethoven, Janáček, Brahms: Takács Quartet (Edward Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes [violins], Richard O’Neill [viola], András Fejér [cello]), Jeremy Denk (piano). Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, Frick Collection, New York, 1.5.2025. (ES-S)
Beethoven – String Quartet No.1 in F major, Op.18
Janáček – String Quartet No.1, ‘Kreutzer Sonata’
Brahms – Piano Quintet in F minor, Op.34
The reopening of the Frick Collection this spring marks both a physical transformation and a reaffirmation of its founding vision. Housed in the former Fifth Avenue mansion of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, the museum has long offered a rare fusion of intimacy and grandeur: Old Master paintings, Renaissance bronzes and eighteenth-century decorative arts displayed not in sterile galleries but in richly appointed domestic settings. Designed in 1914 by Carrère and Hastings – the Beaux-Arts architects also responsible for the New York Public Library – the mansion was later expanded in 1935 by John Russell Pope to accommodate its new role as a public museum.
The three-year renovation and expansion, led by Selldorf Architects, preserved the essential character of the mansion while discreetly modernizing its infrastructure and repurposing its internal layout. The upstairs private quarters where the Frick family once lived have been transformed into additional galleries, and the conservation studios have been relocated. Among the most significant additions is a new, state-of-the-art auditorium – built below ground and named for donor Stephen A. Schwarzman – intended for concerts, lectures and other public programs. Its debut signals a renewed commitment to the Frick’s tradition of chamber music and intellectual exchange, reimagined for the twenty-first century.
Since its inaugural concert in 1938, the museum has cultivated a distinguished chamber music tradition. From Artur Schnabel to Mitsuko Uchida, from the Budapest Quartet to the Guarneri, many luminaries have contributed to the Frick’s reputation as one of New York’s premier venues for chamber music. Now, to mark the reopening of the museum and the debut of its new auditorium, the Frick has launched a Spring Music Festival that reflects both historical depth and stylistic range, with offerings spanning Baroque to contemporary. Among the featured programs are a Handel recital with Lea Desandre and Anthony Roth Costanzo alongside the Jupiter Ensemble; the New York premieres of works by Tyshawn Sorey and Vijay Iyer performed by Sarah Rothenberg; and an evening of Robert Schumann violin sonatas with Alexi Kenney and Amy Yang.
The Takács Quartet first performed at the Frick in 1984, early in their international career and just a decade after the ensemble’s founding in Budapest. Of the original lineup, only cellist András Fejér remains, yet the group has consistently renewed itself without compromising its artistic identity. Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, the quartet continues to exemplify clarity, precision and expressive depth. For their return to the Frick as part of the reopening celebrations, they were joined by pianist Jeremy Denk in a program that moved between restraint, turbulence and grandeur – an ideal vehicle for exploring the acoustic character of the Frick’s elegant and discreet new auditorium.
From the first attack of Beethoven’s String Quartet No.1 in F major, the ensemble’s coordination was striking – each entrance crisp, each phrase paced with quiet authority. There was no need for rhetorical underlining: articulation and balance did the work. The first movement unfolded with a kind of structural patience, revealing not just thematic logic but the give-and-take of four players deeply attuned to one another. The Adagio was marked by restraint – affective, not sentimental – with silences that felt like held breaths. The Scherzo had bite without overstatement, and the final movement’s rhythmic edge emerged more from tension than volume. The room’s acoustic clarity undoubtedly supported the group’s ensemble precision, but the absence of wood paneling gave the sound a certain neutrality – at times a coolness – that seemed to drain some warmth from the inner voices. The Takács’s reading recalled Haydn, not only in its elegance and motivic economy but in its quiet refusal of grandiosity. Their Beethoven was neither nostalgic nor monumental. Instead, it was alive to detail and shaped by long-line thinking, the kind of performance where motivic connections – rather than tonal peaks – provide the contour.
One of the most distinctive string quartets of the early twentieth century, Janáček’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ remains surprisingly underperformed. Written in 1923 and inspired by Tolstoy’s novella of the same name, the work was also shaped by Janáček’s obsessive, unreciprocated attachment to Kamila Stösslová, the young married woman who served as muse to many of his late compositions. Emotionally volatile and structurally unorthodox, the quartet bypasses conventional development in favor of obsessive fragments, abrupt contrasts and compressed lyricism.
The Takács players did not try to unify the music’s torn edges but leaned into its jagged lyricism – its abrupt emotional pivots, fierce whispers and wounded outbursts. Where Beethoven hinted at Haydn’s motivic logic, here Janáček’s repetitions and fragmentary gestures seemed to circle memory and rupture. The ensemble’s control remained firm, but the emotional energy was far less contained: sudden swells broke through whispered pianissimos, phrases ended in silence or dissolution, and the players allowed dissonance to hang in the air unresolved. Dusinberre’s first violin lines pushed toward the operatic, almost vocal in their anguish; Fejér, with his grainy, dark-hued tone, reinforced the work’s psychological weight from below; and O’Neill, with a mellow but resonant tone, gave shape to the quartet’s turbulent interior, maintaining expressive tension within even the most fragmented material. His phrasing created connective tissue between violent outbursts and moments of stasis, lending coherence to a score that can easily feel episodic. In this more exposed and unstable musical terrain, the auditorium’s clarity served the music’s intensity, though again without lending it much warmth. If anything, the space heightened the sense of emotional rawness – a kind of clean brutality, sharpened by contrast with the understated intimacy of the Beethoven that preceded it.
The second half was devoted to Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F minor, a work whose stormy grandeur and structural density presented yet another expressive challenge. Jeremy Denk joined the quartet, not as soloist but as equal partner – alert to texture and especially sensitive to the interplay between piano and strings. The Frick lent an 1883 Steinway & Sons concert grand named Palisandra for the occasion – an instrument built during Brahms’s lifetime, whose resonance and tonal palette evoked the very soundworld in which the quintet was conceived. Yet in this intimate space, the piano’s projection occasionally tipped the balance and overwhelmed the ensemble’s carefully blended dynamic. To their credit, Denk and the Takács responded with sensitivity – adjusting touch and articulation where possible, though the instrument’s power was always just at the edge of containment.
Edward Dusinberre shaped the first violin’s surging lines with lyrical urgency; Harumi Rhodes, in the second violin seat, responded with clarity and poise. Under the attentive and proud gaze of her father, the great violist Samuel Rhodes – a longtime member of the Juilliard String Quartet – she played as she had throughout the evening: with quiet authority and a finely judged sense of ensemble. The Andante unfolded with a kind of searching lyricism, gently unsettled by harmonic shifts. The Scherzo moved with dark energy, but never rushed; and in the Finale, Denk and the quartet held a tight focus on pacing and cohesion, resisting the temptation to let the closing material sprawl. There was grandeur, certainly – but always shaped from within, not imposed from outside.
What lingered most after the final chord was not just the refinement of the playing, but the sheer vitality the Takács Quartet continues to bring to the stage. They play not like a group looking back, but like musicians still in love with the act of discovery. That sense of urgency, of collective listening and risk-taking, was present in every phrase. Nothing in their performance felt settled or habitual. If anything, it offered a sense of renewal – of chamber music as a living art, and of the quartet’s evolving bond with it.
Edward Sava-Segal